New Official Web Site

TC-lispers mailman mailing list

Our first meeting

TWIN CITIES LISP GROUP INAUGURAL MEETING
9 June 2009, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM CDT
Common Roots Cafe
Corner of 26th and Lyndale, Minneapolis, MN
http://preview.tinyurl.com/tclisp-crc
There's a lisp renaissance out there, spurred by the availability of several
high-quality open source Common Lisp implementations (SBCL, CMUCL, Clozure CL,
and CLISP, at least). After attending the 2009 International Lisp Conference in
Cambridge (http://www.international-lisp-conference.org/2009/index) I was fired
up to see if we could share in some of this renaissance here in the Twin Cities.
I was also inspired by visiting with the Vancouver Lisp group, Lispvan. They
meet roughly monthly at some location offering coffee, beer, and wine, where they
have a talk and some mingling.
In the interests of setting up something like this here, I've (well, Josh Hamell
did all the real work) set up a mailman mailing list, tc-lispers
(http://sift.info/mailman/listinfo/tc-lispers_sift.info), and I've reserved the
meeting room at Common Roots Cafe
(http://www.commonrootscafe.com/ourcommunity.htm), which offers the
aforementioned coffee, beer, and wine (and tasty food --- vegetarian is
available and there seem to be at least some vegan options).
At the first meeting John Maraist will talk about the NST unit testing framework
for Common Lisp, which he has been developing at SIFT (abstract follows). Then
we can plan a next meeting, chat, mingle, and swap stories. Share and learn the
latest Lisp applications, techniques, packages, and implementations. Show off
your lambda tattoos, evil hacks, and wigflip graphics.
Please come if you can and, whether you can or not, please sign up for the
tc-lispers mailing list.
Best,
Robert Goldman
NST: A Unit Test Framework for Common Lisp
In this talk we will introduce the Lisp unit test framework NST. SIFT developed
NST for internal use on a number of ongoing Lisp projects, and we believe that
the system is now mature enough to release more broadly. In this talk we will
review the notion of a unit test, and introduce the use of NST in Lisp project
development. NST's implementation makes interesting use of a number of Lisp
features --- macro expansion, compile-time execution, metaobject protocols ---
and we will discuss its current implementation as well as the lessons we learned
along the way.